


time in a bottle

by atlntyda



Category: Bleach
Genre: Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-25
Updated: 2020-08-25
Packaged: 2021-03-06 14:21:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,921
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26110327
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/atlntyda/pseuds/atlntyda
Summary: Here, she will need her weight, in blood, in salt, in conviction.She finds that she has it. Maybe she's always had it.Orihime, after the war.
Kudos: 9





	time in a bottle

* * *

Orihime would stumble, if it weren't for the fact that victory - whisper quiet conviction, exhaust rubbing down her spine, pushed back - won't let up the forward nudge in the small of her curved tailbone. Weeks have dragged out sleepless, thinning rations have been parted between large squadrons. She has almost broken clean in two between aiding the Fourth and reaching for the front lines. She has seen comrades die, and in the end, she had learned to not let it affect how a third of an energy bar managed to dull the wrecking shivers in her knees. There hadn't been anything else to forego, so during the final weeks, she'd learned, through trial and error and waking sleep not to dry heave when exposed to guts. When she has her bunched up fists in the bares of survivors stretched out on linen spread over a patch of ground. Turned over, splayed raw. She had learned, through trial and error, how to see a splinter of time go through her parted fingers. And how to see Ichigo's needs, track his thoughts.

They had come out on the other side.

Dawn is wet and dewy. It smells of late summer passing through Karakura, sweeping past even though the end of August is drawing up cold. She walks, carefully supporting her somewhat healed left ankle, her patched up ribs and her thin heart, up the steps to the apartment. Home.

She can't quite bend down, and she can't leverage her way sitting. She knows that where she relaxes is where she will fail to revert from.

"Lily," she sighs, her drawn breath admitting the shortcomings which come - after everything. She summons, but draws only on the barest of the power that is steadily humming beneath her skin. Like insects buzzing. Constantly, a little uncomfortably, but also nice in the way of seeing old friends after a long time apart.

Lily materializes by her left shoulder. She crawls up to a stand. Orihime twists her head slowly. She feels the twinge of a bruised tendon. She attempts to smile. "My keys - " she murmurs, "Gosh, I hope they're still here - in the magnolia pot."

Lily's thick wings vibrate softly. She smiles, all in equal measure. "Don't worry, 'Hime," she says, and hops off of Orihime's shoulder. The magnolia in the pot is sprouting twigs, green and twisting at the tips. She wonders how that is. How it's survived - she doesn't know how long it's survived without her tending to it. She doesn't know how long it's been.

She holds out a hand for Lily to land back on once she's located the key on the back of the pot. Her tiny feet pad across Orihime's heart line. She drops the single key in the cradle of her palm, which has become a little more lined and rough with weather, now made to endure.

"Thank you," she whispers. Her vocal chords are tense and tired. But they are the only part of herself which she has allowed to develop a conscious feeling of ache in - an acute feeling of the duress she has put herself under in the past few months.

Lily shakes her head. "We will always be here for you, 'Hime."

She disappears with a soft pop, a shone of gold light. Orihime is left with the curl of her hand around the key, digging into the crevices and the scars and the lines put there naturally, and unnaturally.

*

Orihime allows herself rest. A tempered sort of isolation which begins with locked doors, nightmares; she sits in the shower, allows it to run cold, to add to the water bill. With a steaming pot of gyokuro - the fine leafed type, an old gift - and the entire tea set set up in her living room. She's aware of that she's allowing it to waste, that she's steeping it wrong, that by the time she climbs to her feet, having prodded old bruises freshly blood filled again, purple and starch, and reaching for a towel, hair dripping, splashing into two separate cups, that she is creating ruin.

Not what she has forced herself to grown used to. But mundane ruin. Senior year has progressed sleepily for two weeks. Orihime has shown up to homeroom twice. Both Mondays. Showered herself sick for the remaining duration of the weeks. She stirs, counter clockwise to clockwise, for hours, a steady pair of wrists, in a soup until she has reduced it into a state of sallow, simmering vegetables and a thick slush of a bouillon.

She leaves her phone on mute and ignores the hard raps of knuckles on her door. Leaves everything be until her phone stops blinking and the knocks grow shallow and weak. Until there is a ghost imprint of Tatsuki on her doorstep, bewildered and worried and seething with it. She's sorry. But she can't.

*

One day, the rage, the sorrow, the horror - fades, putters out. Until it is only remnants of what it was. She sheds a skin, and rearranges all of herself again.

She picks up her phone. Answers on the third signal.

"Tatsuki-chan," she says, and allows for a fracture of a smile to break through.

The line is quiet for a little bit. And then, "Orihime, you - " Tatsuki draws a huge, rattling breath, "I wanna tell you what a fucking _dumbass_ you've been. But then I figured - I don't get it. I won't get it. So I'm - I'm glad that you're finally answering your phone again. You big idiot."

She feels tears, the wetness of it, detached from the roiling emotions usually accompanying it. "I'm sorry," she murmurs. She means it.

Tatsuki chokes out half a laugh, half a sob. "I love you. I'm glad you're coming back to us."

*

It hasn't hit her until she meets Ishida at the grocery store, that she hasn't thought of any of them outside of the context of - of war. Of battle and ruin. Not since she came back. They have figured in nightmares, and in bouts of dreams. But here - where time actually ticks, where hours go and minutes pass - here they figure just as they normally would.

"Orihi - Inoue-san," Uryuu corrects himself hastily. His basket is arranged meticulously: leafy chard, a foiled wrap of six vegetable-based nigiri, organic carrots and spring onion. Chanterelles, the first of the season, she thinks. On the far end of the basket is a cold green tea and a half litre water bottle.

"Uryuu-kun," she says, and grips her basket a little tighter. She had felt almost self conscious of its contents, she thinks, afterwards. Simple produce. Rid of mayonnaise, custard, of figs and pomegranate and the ingredients to the chocolate parfait she was thinking of seasoning with mame miso. Instead, she has packed it with the ingredients to make a proper broth, and scallions to top. Five eggs, and salt and pepper for her mills.

"How are you?" he asks. His eyes go skittishly over her face.

"I'm well, thank you," she replies, with dignity. She tilts her smile. "And you?"

"Good. I'm - I'm good." And he says it with the after thought and pressure of someone who is honest in the word of facing up to what he owes. But, she thinks, as they say their goodbyes a while later, having run out of things to chat of - it's not to her that he owes this. It's to the victims of the war he helped instigate. Orihime has never thought of herself as that victim.

*

"Kurosaki-kun," She poses, like a question, surprised. She allows Ichigo to pass through the narrow opening she's left her door ajar in. She's unused to him. In this setting, perhaps. Or just unused to seeing him like this. Coming here with his brow knit and his jaw clenched. As though he's ready for a battle that is not really a battle.

Ichigo doesn't say anything in return. She closes the door carefully behind the retreat of his shoulders, hooks the chain into its slide. She clasps her palms unconsciously in front of herself. An almond shape of her hands, something almost protective in how she cups them.

"Was it Hueco Mundo?" he asks. Abruptly.

Orihime shakes her head. It takes her a few seconds, but she does it decisively. "It wasn't," she says.

"Aizen - coming here?"

She shakes her head.

Ichigo grinds his teeth. "Yhwach?" He twists on one heel. There is a tempered and honed grace in the ball of his foot. In every muscle and lean tendon. She can't scrub their past doings out of her hands any more than he can out of, well, all of him.

"It was none of those things, Kurosaki-kun," she says. She steps in towards him. "It was all of them. I - " she halts. She is unsure, suddenly, of how this tangle of emotions is supposed to ever be made understood. She's not quite sure that she understands all of it herself. "I want you to know that it was my decision. I'm not sure I can explain it. But it was always me. Me who decided to come along. To follow you."

There is something wildly upset in his eyes. His lip curls, and where he's half turned towards her, she sees how he changes - switches parts of himself around. To arrange himself into a jumble of a man more suited to pick this fight back up. The quarter of a breath in which he closes his eyes, right before they revert to wide, large and in pain - she sees how he would like to believe her. How he would like to submit to that she has her own will. That she is willing to believe her behest, her commanding her own actions.

"You didn't have much of a choice," he says.

A darker part of her, with bloodied teeth, wants to smile. She doesn't know where it comes from, nor why it wells up inside of her. Why it feels like she is conquering her demons by becoming one with them. She only knows it's there. She shakes her head. "Maybe not. But I made it. I made that choice."

_Don't take that away from m_ e, she wants to say. She means to say.

When she shuts the door behind him a while later both of them wordless. One of the many facets of defeat weighs down on anything Orihime would want to say. She wonders what will be next.

*

She sees Yhwach and his Sternritter, rounding up to form half a crescent around him. Every beat of a clock ticking down. He is the center piece. And they are running out of time.

Ichigo is running out of time.

I reject, Orihime thinks, and clenches her palms, curls them into fists and prays. Prays, far from the shrine, from her mother and father and - Sora; far from the sores she would get on her knees from laying too closely, too long, on the tatami mat. Rye rubs her calves, and those times she would allow for herself to cry, the salt would make her lips chap.

In a sense, it would always make her feel lighter.

Here, she will need her weight, in blood, in salt, in conviction.

She finds that she has it. Maybe she's always had it.

*

_I reject_ , she prays. But to no God. She does not stretch out her arms, the wide span of an overgrown sallow's wings. There is no God here. There is only Orihime herself, and the ever compassing darkness.

_I reject_.

*

**Author's Note:**

> cleaning out my old files and cleaning them up. decided to stash some of them somewhere out in the open.


End file.
